I saw Bastard Assignments back when they did an event at Safehouse 1, Peckham in November 2014, and have been an embarrassing fan boy every since. I always leave their nights feeling like my conception of what is performatively possible has been expanded – not a common feeling (most comparable night I can think of is LUPA, does anyone remember the brilliant LUPA? Run out of a garage on a housing estate in Bethnal Green?).

I talked to Tim from Bastard Assignments after that gig at Safehouse, asking how the space had been to work with (Safehouse is a set of two adjacent semi detached houses in Peckham in a state of considerable degradation – picture exposed brickwork, holes in walls, crumbling masonry, distressed wooden floorboards). He mentioned how they’d been rehearsing their experimental classical event there in a tight spot before a film crew arrived to record a fund raising campaign for (I think?) War Child.

Something about the weirdness of that adjacency, about the well meaning utilisation of this degraded-aesthetic-for-hire, about taking a building in Peckham and presenting it as a space in Syria, stuck in my head and half a year later I wrote a short play influenced by it. I sent it to a new writing night called Etch at Peckham Pelican (long live Etch!) and in October 2015 they asked a director called Olly Dawe to work on it. Unexploded is a slippery text with two concurrent, inter-spliced narratives and Olly (and cast) was spectacular with it. Five years later I learn Olly went to school with Josh, from the Bastards. Ugh. Small world. January 29th 2020 we met at The Glory and talked about the beginnings of this project (it was very different then. Karaoke?).

For Unprecedented we assigned each member of the Bastards another member and asked them to imagine what it might be like inside their head. As Olly and I understood it, at no time in their history had they made work about ‘the Bastards’/each other, and a social distanced lockdown seemed an appealing time to try this. I wrote texts in response to Zoom chats and Olly directed and (I believe?) oversaw the editing and visual element. I wondered if we might break up the Beatles but I believe they survived the attempt.